24 as assistant manager and then as man- ager. Mr. Barber greeted us in his former office at the Ninth A venue end of the termInal. He was dressed in a navy- blue suit, a white button-down shirt, and a dark-red tie with white pin dots. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and his gray hair and mustache were neatly trimmed. He looked pleasant and im- portant. Come to think of it, that's how the bus station (the finished parts, that is) looked, too-pleasant and important. Outside, the graying light-orange brick had been replaced by a wall of indented two-story-high picture windows, and above that, sup- ported on handsome, round brick col umns, were huge, striking cross- hatched steel beams that were another two stories high and painted cherry red. The whole thing looked very functional. "It is," Mr. Barber told us. "We call it the truss. It holds up part of the building." Inside, the institutional-looking butterscotch-enamelled brick walls had been replaced by dark-reddish-brown mat bricks The bright, harsh lighting had been replaced by subdued, cool lighting. The not-too-uplifting white- and-gray flecked terrazzo floors had been replaced by a cheerful combi- nation of terra-cotta and buff quarry tiles. The old battered escalators had been replaced by sleek, snazzy ones, fitted out with glass balustrades and brass trim. And the damp, warm, suffocating air had been replaced by air-condi tioning. "For years, we received complaints about how bus riders felt," Mr. Barber said as we walked down the main con- course toward the Eighth Avenue end of the terminal. "They said they thought of the bus station as dingy, hot, and very unappealing. They said they felt like second-class citizens- compared with airline travellers. And, compared with the old bus station, most airports are plush. We wanted to upgrade this facility to that level. We were also aiming at a shopping-mall atmosphere. The Port Authority dic- tated that all the stores in the terminal except those on the street level have the same wood-batten canopies over their fronts. And every remodelling design for each individual store was subject to approval by the P.A. We'll have over seventy stores here when we're finished; that's twice as many as we had before." Midway down the concourse was a fenced-off construction area where a jackhammer was blasting. The area would eventually be the new waItIng room. As we passed, Mr. Barber put his palm to his cheek and looked up in mock agony. "That's been going on for three years," he said. "0 h, some of the things we've done to commuters. Of the hundred and seventy thousand people who pass through here on a weekday, a hundred and twenty thou- sand of them are commuters. We built over and under and around them. Commuters establish patterns-their favorite routes from the bus platform to the street-and they don't want to be diverted. But most of that is behind us now, and we're starting to get very positive reactions from them." W e walked with Mr Barber amid a continuous flow of commuters. The place was humming. Many shops were already open. You could buy women's lingerie, women's bathing suits, women's sportswear, books, croissants, cheese, Dab German beer . You could patronize the only Walgreen's we know of in N ew York City . We could hear piped-in music, the jackhammer receding, and lots of footsteps. We tried asking a few random commuters what they thought about the changes in the bus station, but most of them either didn't answer or said, "It's very nice," and kept walking, without missing a stride. The only skeptical comment came from Howard Levine, of West Caldwell, New Jersey, a smil- ing and relaxed man with a Vandyke beard. Mr. Levine, who has been a commuter for ten years, said, "All this might be nice. I don't know if most commuters want these amenities. They just want to get to work and get home." Gloria Rogers, a gray-haired lady in a business suit, from Wyckoff, New Jersey, said that she'd been commuting for twenty years, and that she thought the bus station was beautiful. Tournament T HE Professional Pool Players Association held its sixth annual World Open Pocket Billiard Champi- onship recently in the Grand Ball- ITllGllililIT room of the Roosevelt Hotel, and we went over one afternoon to take a look. The Grand Ballroom is a glittery sort of place (rust-and-gold carpets, mir- rored sconces), with a balcony run- ning around three of its sides. On the ballroom's floor were five pool tables, each of which measured nine feet by four and a half feet and had a green felt surface, and each of which was oc- cupied by two players in formal dress. White-gloved referees stood nearby, observing shots and calling out scores. Seated around the sides of the room and on the balcony were about a hundred and fifty spectators, many of whom murmured things like "Nice shot" from time to time, and most of whom indulged in a restrained sort of applause-it reminded us of the stands at Wimbledon-whenever an espe- cially skillful shot was made. In a chair on the sidelines sat a blond, mustached young man named Arnd Bollhardt, who is a director of the Professional Pool Players Associa- tion, or P.P.P .A. We asked him to tell us something about the tournament. "We have ninety-three entrants this year," Bollhardt said. "Sixty-four are in the men's division, thirteen are in the women's division, and sixteen are in the junior division, which includes people seventeen and under. We have players from Canada, Sweden, and West Germany, as well as from the United States. The P.P.P .A. was formed six years ago, after a lot of the good players-for a number of reasons -broke away from the Billiard Con- gress of America, or B.C.A., which until then had been the main national organization. Pocket billiards-pool- is definitely growing. In fact, more than thirty-one million Americans now play the game. When we first got organized, of course, we realized that there was a certain stigma attached to the game-the image of the old-time pool hall-and we're doing what we can to counter that image. We think we're making real progress. There's been a lot of pool on television late- ly-championship matches, and play- offs between well-known players like Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi. And Mayor Koch has proclaimed this Billiard Week in New York City. If you stay around, you're sure to see some of the world's top players. In fact, there's Steve Mizerak over there." Mizerak, who is currently featured in a series of beer commercials on television was sitting at one end of the ballroom, and we went over to say hello. He is a heavyset, sunny-looking